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Welcome to issue #007 of Emerging LA

For those who don’t yet know me, hello! 👋

I'm Brandon Hoffman, the founder of Emerging LA. I grew up in Southern California, and after stints at Wall Street and Silicon Valley, I was excited to return home in 2019 and settle in Los Angeles.

The vision for Emerging LA is to be an IRL-focused community that brings founders, investors, and operators together to unlock the full potential of LA’s emerging tech ecosystem.

I started it, because I know the power of community.

Community changed my life… I hope this community can play a role in yours!

📆 Event Recap

Highlights, reflections, and pictures from our our latest event

The Mediatech LA event on Red Carpet had 800 guests!!!

Our Emerging LA Red Carpet event had 800+ attendees from two different worlds:

• 1) Traditional Hollywood: actors, filmmakers, directors, and media execs

• 2) Media Technology: founders, builders, VCs, operators

It was great bringing these disparate groups together!

It was also a lot of fun playing dress-up and putting on a tuxedo on random Wednesday night.

As promised, this was NOT the typical tech happy hour mixer. But the jam-packed 4-hour evening was well worth it!

This MediaTech LA event was in partnership with KINO, which was the star of the show!!!

With this team came 10 short films that were amazing to watch!!

It felt like a mini film festival converging with the tech crowd of VCs, founders and operators.

The KINO team brought everything together at the historic Directors Guild of America last week. As you can see, it is a massive space that is luxurious from top to bottom.

This massive space ended up getting filled up with over 800 people, which shows the appetite for the creative arts, for films of this high quality, and a community event that brings good people together!

At Sunset Ventures, I am a proud investor in KINO's platform and believe in its mission to democratize film & TV for independent creators.

(Disclaimer that I am biased in this regard with KINO, however I did invest because I believe in its mission)

It was a pleasure getting the chance to work alongside the KINO team on this huge undertaking!

I was able to play a small small role in spreading the word around town and bringing the LA techies in Hollywood, but this team made it all happen!!

Clearly, it wasn't hard to convince people to show up for a red carpet.

Everyone looked stunning and took advantage of the photo opp!!

(Meanwhile, it appears my stubborn curl was dangling over my forehead all night and no one told me, until I saw the pics. Smh. But I digress... Lol)

Also, what fun to see Emerging LA on the big screen! 🤩

Without further ado, big shout-outs to:

• Brit MacRae for working her magic with all the sponsors, vendors, and event coordinators!

• Daril Fannin & Austin Worrell, the duo who crushed it on stage!

• Silicon Valley Bank team for leaning in and supporting this project!

📱 Engage with this post on social:

• For Twitter: take me to the tweet

• For LinkedIn: take me to the post

• For Instagram: take me to the pics

To attendees:

A HUGE HUGE thank you for those who came!

I know that it was a long evening and required you to be prompt and to get formally dressed up... yet MANY of you came and there was a positive energy in the air.

A high from which the team and I are still coming down!

To film makers:

Many of you have reached out after being inspired by the films you watched and the filmmakers who won awards.

You want to share your projects and get on the KINO platform… we would love to help you!!

Please do the following which will help us structure the inbound demand

1. Directly reply to this email

2. Expect a Google Form to be shared for you to fill out with required info

3. This will go directly to the queue and the KINO team will be in touch

To those who couldn't make it:

I deeply apologize! This was a hectic event in terms of planning, executing, and managing the level of demand we had, which was oversubscribed beyond the capacity of the venue.

There were another 400–500 people who we simply could not accommodate.

There are going to be many, many more events in store, more galas, and given this success, I am sure a future red carpet event will happen again! 😉

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